The auditor of the Arrecife City Council, who spent 10 months in provisional prison for his indictment in the "Montecarlo" case, has also been indicted in one of the central pieces of the "Unión" case, number 12. Judge Silvia Muñoz has decided to call Carlos Sáenz to testify next Friday, April 25, to answer for alleged crimes of prevarication and embezzlement of public funds.
Along with Sáenz, Dimas Martín's daughter, Elena Martín, who is the head of Contracting for the City Council, as well as two technicians from the Department of Parks and Gardens: Yoana Cabrera Machín León and Loyola del Mar Hernández Álvarez, have also been indicted in this piece.
These four new indictments had been requested by the prosecutor, Javier Ródenas, after analyzing the expert report prepared by the Canary Islands Court of Auditors at the request of the Court of First Instance Number 5. In that report, according to the Prosecutor's Office, "rational indications of criminality are evident" both on the part of the auditor and of the three technicians of the Consistory who "validated the contracting of the audited companies".
Specifically, this piece investigates the contracts with Antonio Gómez Ruiz, through Estudio de Arquitectura La Palmita; with Construcciones y Reparaciones Reina, by Manuel Gregorio Reina Fabre; with Canary Island Publications S.L., publisher of Viva Lanzarote magazine, and with Infogelan Construcciones and Infogelan Fontanería, by Jesús Manuel Martín Brito. This last company is the one that presented the most voluminous billing, reaching 1,193,052 euros from the City Council during the investigated period. The administrator of the company himself acknowledged after being arrested that he had paid illegal commissions in exchange for the awards.
In addition, the cause not only investigates the irregular awarding of contracts and services, but also whether these works were actually carried out and whether there is "duplication" of works or "overcost in the execution". To determine this, the Prosecutor's Office recalls that an expert audit was requested from the company Godoy Consultores and asks the judge to require it "urgently" to report on the status of that report.
Illicit association and "machinations"
Until now, the historical leader of the PIL, Dimas Martín; who was then his right-hand man, Matías Curbelo, and four councilors of the party in the Arrecife City Council: José Miguel Rodríguez; Ubaldo Becerra, María Luisa Blanco and Antonio Machín, were already charged in this piece.
The Prosecutor's Office considers that all of them were part of a "possible corrupt plot that nests in the Arrecife City Council under an illicit association and/or criminal co-participation, consisting of the execution of essential acts for the commission of crimes of multiple projection (machinations to alter the price of things, prevarication, disclosure of reserved and privileged information, bribery, influence peddling, embezzlement of public funds...), but whose common denominator is the attack on the public administration".
The link between almost all those charged in this piece is their "belonging to the Party of Independents of Lanzarote, under the omnipresent power of who was the founder of the political formation, the charged Dimas Martín, who would use the councilors of the PIL group to obtain irregular funds with which to attend to the financing of his political party and also enrich himself with the large illegal commissions demanded from businessmen as a means for the awarding of works and contracts with the Local Corporation".
In exchange, according to the prosecutor's writing, these businessmen received "the cascading awarding of contracts that, under the fraudulent modality of minor contracting, violated the most elementary rules of public bidding: transparency, legality, freedom of competition and equal opportunities".
The auditor, a key piece in another case
Although his name appears several times in the summary of the "Unión" case, the auditor of Arrecife was not charged at the beginning of this case, but he was in another piece investigated later, number 13, focused on payments to an electricity company for allegedly unprovided works. In addition, he was arrested and even sent to provisional prison in another procedure opened later, the Montecarlo case.
In that case, Carlos Sáenz is the main defendant and must answer for alleged crimes of embezzlement of public funds, bribery, money laundering, prevarication and falsification of public documents not only in the Arrecife City Council, but also in that of San Bartolomé and in the majorero Consistory of La Oliva, in which he was also an auditor.
In the Montecarlo case, in which the payment of "inflated" invoices or for work not carried out in these municipalities is investigated, Sáenz would have allegedly acted in connivance with politicians from other formations. In fact, in that case there is only one former PIL official charged, José Miguel Rodríguez, and the rest are from different parties, such as the PP, CC and the PSOE.
After spending 10 months in provisional prison, Carlos Sáenz asked to rejoin his position as auditor in Arrecife and although he initially took medical leave for several months, in August he returned to occupy his position, in which he continues currently.
